Increased digital video traffic puts a premium on conserving bandwidth in a given transmission media. This is especially pertinent for bandwidth constrained transmission media, such as cable and wireless. Bandwidth constraint is a challenge that broadcasters, and other providers of digital video content, must overcome to ensure that the quality of the video product meets the expectations of the viewer. Content providers also confront, with respect to demographics and taste, a segmented, kaleidoscopically dynamic, viewer environment.
The selection of an appropriate video compression level is important to content providers that deliver video content over bandwidth constrained channels such as digital subscriber lines (DSLs). The content providers want to minimize the load on the network by choosing the highest compression possible. However, to obtain customer satisfaction with the video content (e.g., movies), the content providers may provide less compression to provide a higher quality signal. To strike a balance between compression and viewer satisfaction, it is common practice for content providers to simply choose a single compression level that has been deemed “acceptable” by viewers for a set of test content. The single compression rate is then used for all content.
Technological capabilities make it possible to modulate the compression of a transmitted signal so that content providers no longer need to be tied to a single compression level for all content. The basis upon which to select compression levels, however, is a data problem, not a technological problem. The problem is complex and involves at least the identification of one or more characteristics that can be used to distinguish the customer satisfaction with a selection of video content choices, a methodology to collect data on a selected characteristic, and relating the data automatically to the compression level of the transmitted video content.